About the Programming Historian

Peer Review

All tutorials at the Programming Historian are rigorously peer reviewed, guided through the review process by one of our editors. Review involves a thorough exchange with the lesson editor to ensure the lesson works as intended and that all concepts are explained for a non-specialist reader, before the tutorial is sent to external reviewers.

Our peer review process is a bit different from what might be considered the traditional peer review process. We do not solicit reviews to judge whether a tutorial is “good enough” to be published. Rather, we consider the review process an integral component of a collaborative, productive, and sustainable effort for scholars to teach and learn from each other. Once a tutorial slips into our editorial workflow, we do everything we can to make sure the tutorial becomes as useful as possible and published in a reasonable amount of time. Consult our Reviewer Guidelines for more information.

Open Source

The Programming Historian is committed to open source values. All contributed lessons make use of open source programming languages and software whenever possible. This policy is meant to minimize costs for all parties, and to allow the greatest possible level of participation. We believe everyone should be able to benefit from these tutorials, not just those with large research budgets for expensive proprietary software. Since 2016, a citable version of the Programming Historian project has been deposited on Zenodo. The 2018 deposit is available at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1477854.

Diversity Policy

The Programming Historian is committed to diversity, and we insist on a harassment-free space for all contributors to the project, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age or religion, or technical experience. Our commitment to diversity extends to our Editorial Board, which has adopted a diversity policy to ensure that members from any one gender or any one nationality do not comprise more than 50% + 1 of the members on the board. This is to ensure that the project continues to benefit from diverse viewpoints. This policy is under perpetual review and we welcome suggestions on it from the community.

Funding & Ownership

The Programming Historian is a volunteer-driven project. It is published by the Editorial Board of the Programming Historian.

History of the Project

The Programming Historian was founded in 2008 by William J. Turkel and Alan MacEachern. It focused heavily on Python and was published open access as a Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) ‘Digital Infrastructure’ project. In 2012, The Programming Historian expanded its editorial team and launched as an open access peer reviewed scholarly journal of methodology for digital historians. In 2016 we added a Spanish Language sub-team to the initial English-language team and in 2017 started publishing translated lessons under the title The Programming Historian en español. In 2018 we hosted our first Spanish-language writing workshop, issued a call for new lessons in Spanish, and began to plan for translating lessons into English. In the same year we added a French language sub-team and will launch The Programming Historian en français in 2019.

The Programming Historian (ISSN: 2397-2068) is released under a CC-BY license.